Ian Lamont writes: "The City of Boston has reached a $170,000 settlement with Simon Glik who was arrested by Boston Police in 2007 after using his mobile phone to record police arresting another man on Boston Common. Police claimed that Glik had violated state wiretapping laws, but later dropped the charges and admitted the officers were wrong to arrest him. Glik had brought a lawsuit against the city (aided by the ACLU) because he claimed his civil rights were violated. According to today's ACLU statement:

As part of the settlement, Glik agreed to withdraw his appeal to the Community Ombudsman Oversight Panel. He had complained about the Internal Affairs Division's investigation of his complaint and the way they treated him. IAD officers made fun of Glik for filing the complaint, telling him his only remedy was filing a civil lawsuit. After the City spent years in court defending the officers' arrest of Glik as constitutional and reasonable, IAD reversed course after the First Circuit ruling and disciplined two of the officers for using "unreasonable judgment" in arresting Glik.

Fluffeh writes: "Australia’s competition regulator will today take iconic technology giant Apple to court for advertising its new iPad tablet as featuring “4G” speeds — which are not supported on Australian telecommunications networks. One of the key features of the new iPad is support for 4G speeds, however, the 4G speeds which the new iPad supports will not be available in Australia, with Apple’s technical specifications page only listing it as supporting the 700Mhz and 2100Mhz spectrum bands, neither of which are being used in Australian telcos to provide 4G services. The case is a bit shaky in many opinions though, as Apple does state in the fine print "4G LTE is supported only on AT&T and Verizon networks in the US; and on Bell, Rogers and Telus networks in Canada. Data plans sold separately. See your carrier for details.""

techfun89 writes: "The wait may finally be over for the rumored Google Drive or GDrive. GigaOm's Om Malik says that it will be launched the first week of April.

"According to the details from my sources, Google is going to offer 1 GB of storage space for free, but will charge for more storage. The market leader Dropbox currently offers 2 GB for free. Google's product will come with a local client and the web interface will look much like the Google Docs interface. Interestingly, it will launch for Google Apps customers and will be domain specific as well. Google has also built an API for third party apps with this service so folks can store content from other apps in the Google drive. My sources are impressed, so far with what they have seen."

Google has fumbled in the past like with their initial release of Google Music without any record labels, which they later fixed. Google Play could to have ties to GDrive for storing things like digital movie content. So the potential exists for big results from Google Drive."

coondoggie writes: "The Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Justice teamed up for a coast-to-coast crackdown on identity thieves this week. The coast-to-coast law enforcement onslaught arrested 105 people in 23 states and included indictments, arrests and the execution of search warrants involving the potential theft of thousands of identities and taxpayer refunds, the IRS stated. In all, 939 criminal charges are included in the 69 indictments and information related to identity theft."

cconnell writes: "The FBI has been trying for twelve years to modernize its case file computer system. The current system was antiquated when it was introduced in 1995 and has been widely criticized as one of the reasons the FBI was not able to "connect the dots" in its terrorism investigations in 2000 and 2001.

The first modernization effort, Virtual Case File, ran from 2000 to 2005, cost $170 million and failed completely.

In March 2006, the FBI started the Sentinel project to try again. The original target completion date was December 2009. The target slipped to June 2010, then September 2010, then September 2011 and then January 2012. Recently, the completion target slipped again to May 2012. The cost has also risen, from $425 million to $451 million, dwarfing VCF.

Sentinel will not succeed, given its current definition, budget and schedule. Even allowing for some missing features, an additional 10% budget increase, and another four-month slip to September 2012, Sentinel will fail. I strongly suspect that in May 2013 it still will not be fully operational with high quality."

tguyton writes: "The good news: the FDA just approved the distribution of the first drug to treat the underlying cause of Cystic Fibrosis, called Kalydeco by Vertex Pharmaceuticals. The bad news: this drug will only affect 4% of patients with the disease in the US. From the article:

[Affected patients] with the so-called G551D mutation have a defective protein that fails to balance the flow of chloride and water across the cell wall, leading to the buildup of internal mucus. The vast majority of cystic fibrosis patients have a different genetic defect, in which the protein does not reach the cell wall. Vertex is developing another drug to try and address that problem. Study data for that drug is expected later this year.

Hopefully the research involved will be applicable to finding treatments for other genetic diseases."

adeelarshad82 writes: Stepping away from their usual desktop build-it articles, PCMag attempts to explore the idea of assembling a touch-screen all-in-one desktop. With the help of a bare-bones kit they were able to assemble the PC that runs on Intel Core i3-2120 with 2TB WD hard drive and 8GB DDR3 RAM for less than $850.

jason388 writes: After a long journey of 23 seasons "The Simpsons" has come to an end. A senior , a senior executive close to the show told TheWrap.com that after the next season the show will be suspended.Link to Original Source

narramissic writes: "The Department of Homeland Security on Thursday announced plans to revamp its Secure Flight program, with the agency no longer no longer assigning risk scores to passengers or using predictive behavior technology. In addition, the Transportation Security Administration, part of DHS, will have direct control of checking domestic passenger lists against terrorist watch lists, instead of the airlines, said DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff. But as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of privacy advocacy group the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), notes, air passengers still can't see the reasons why they're targeted for extensive searches or kept off flights, nor can they correct bad information on the terrorist watch lists. 'The problems with the watch list are still valid and are not going away,' said Rotenberg."

Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday July 19, 2007 @10:18AM
from the 6,000-skulls dept.

Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "Researchers at the University of Cambridge have combined studies of global human genetic variations with skull measurements worldwide to show conclusively the validity of the single origin hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis contended that different populations independently evolved from Homo erectus to Home sapiens in different areas. The lead researcher explains, 'The origin of anatomically modern humans has been the focus of much heated debate. Our genetic research shows the further modern humans have migrated from Africa, the more genetic diversity has been lost within a population. However, some have used skull data to argue that modern humans originated in multiple spots around the world. We have combined our genetic data with new measurements of a large sample of skulls to show definitively that modern humans originated from a single area in Sub-saharan Africa.' The article abstract is available from Nature."

Posted
by
kdawson
on Thursday July 19, 2007 @08:37AM
from the tell-me-again-why-dell-can't-do-this dept.

cristarol writes "Wal-Mart has begun selling a $298 PC (Everex IMPACT GC3502). It comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and OpenOffice.org 2.2, as well as a complete lack of crapware: 'Users accustomed to being bombarded with trialware offers and seeing their would-be pristine Windows desktops littered with shortcuts to AOL and other applications will likely be pleased at their absence from the GC3502.' The machine is targeted at the back-to-school market. The hardware is nothing to write home about: a 1.5GHz Via C7 with 1GB of RAM and integrated graphics, but as Ars points out, it should be more than capable of performing basic tasks." Dell sells a low-end PC through Wal-Mart for $200 more, and one assumes it is loaded with crapware. Anybody know for sure?